Skip to main content Skip to search Skip to search

Fiction Short Stories

Invaders

22 Tales from the Outer Limits of Literature

by (author) W.P. Kinsella, Jim Shepard & Steven Millhauser

Publisher
Tachyon Publications
Initial publish date
Jul 2016
Category
Short Stories, General
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781616962104
    Publish Date
    Jul 2016
    List Price
    $21.95

Classroom Resources

Where to buy it

Description

The invasion of the future has begun.

Literary legends including Steven Millhauser, Junot Diáz, Amiri Baraka, and Katharine Dunn have attacked the borders of the every day. Like time traveling mad-scientists, they have concocted outrageous creations from the future. They have seized upon tales of technology gone wrong and mandated that pulp fiction must finally grow up.

In these wildly-speculative stories you will discover the company that controls the world from an alley in Greenwich Village. You’ll find nanotechnology that returns memories to the residents of a nursing home. You’ll rally an avian-like alien to become a mascot for a Major League Baseball team.

The Invaders are here. But did science fiction colonize them first?

About the authors

W.P Kinsella is one of Canad's best selling and most prolific writers. His novels and short story collections includeDance Me Outside and Shoeless Joe (Field of Dreams), both of which were made into movies, as well as The Dixon Cornbelt League, Box Socials, The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, The Winter Helen Dropped By and If Wishes Were Horses. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship and the Order of Canada. He lives in a "new" old house in British Columbia's Fraser Valley.

W.P. Kinsella's profile page

Jim Shepard's profile page

Steven Millhauser's profile page

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Invaders

A Kirkus Science Fiction and Fantasy Book You'll Want to Read in July
A 2016 Publishers Weekly Best Summer Read
A Foreword 4 Great Indie Sci-Fi Titles for Summer 2016

[STAR] “In this very fine reprint anthology, Weisman has brought together 22 SF stories by authors who, although not generally associated with the genre, are clearly fellow travelers (not the ominous invaders suggested by the title). Among the major names are Pulitzer Prize—winner Junot Díaz, George Saunders, Katherine Dunn, Jonathan Lethem, Amiri Baraka, W.P. Kinsella, Steven Millhauser, Robert Olen Butler, and Molly Gloss. Among the best of the consistently strong stories are Díaz’s “Monstro,” the horrifying tale of a disease outbreak in Haiti; Gloss’s near-perfect first-contact story, “Lambing Season”; Kinsella’s totally bizarre “Reports Concerning the Death of the Seattle Albatross Are Somewhat Exaggerated”; Ben Loory’s fable-like “The Squid Who Fell in Love with the Sun”; and Saunders’s “Escape from Spiderhead,” a deeply sexy tale of wild experimental science. In general, the stories tend toward satire and emphasize fine writing more than hitting genre beats—technology is usually a means to an end rather than the center of the story—but most of them could easily have found homes in SF magazines. This volume is a treasure trove of stories that draw equally from SF and literary fiction, and they are superlative in either context.”
?Publishers Weekly

?Further proof, if any more were necessary, that the line between genre and literary fiction is simply speculative.”
?Library Journal

?Invaders lives up to its tagline — ’22 tales from the outer limits of literature’. In here, some of the best writers have freestyled on a blank page, without care for rules or patterns. And in so doing, they’ve produced stories that push the envelope not only of sci-fi, but of literature as a whole.”
?Bookmunch

?This is tight writing and perfectly formed . . . It is evident the authors are playing with the genre, and revelling in it.”
?Strange Alliances

?This new anthology from Jacob Weisman collects an intriguing set of short stories from authors not typically associated with science fiction.”
The Verge

?Invaders is a playful and imaginative exploration of what it means to write in the field of science fiction”
?AV Club

?Well, damn. From the first page to the last, Invaders surprised and intoxicated me, offering one stirring, visionary, warm-hearted, funny, probing story after another. Reading them in quick succession made me feel as if the world was flickering before my eyes, ricocheting from one possible reality to another, beneath a dozen different suns. It would be hard to devise a better survey of those contemporary short fiction writers, both celebrated and undersung, who have worked to smuggle the methods of science fiction into the mainstream.”
?Kevin Brockmeier, author of A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip

"For almost forty years I've believed and practiced and preached that there's no necessary distance between 'high literature' and 'science fiction.' Invaders is convincing proof. Funny, absurd, frightening, streetwise, probing, heartbreaking — the fiction collected here touches all registers."
?Carter Scholz, author of The Amount to Carry: Stories and Radiance

?[O]ne of the best SFF collections I’ve read in years. It’s a smorgasbord of visionary and thought-provoking stories?”
?Battered, Tattered, Yellowed, & Creased

?Consistently excellent.”
?Foreword Reviews

?This collection really explores the outer limits of literature as it claims. I recommend it to you.”
?Magic Realism

?A superb batch of stories by literary authors who have invaded science fiction — and left distinct footprints behind.”
?Black Gate

?The stories are smart and balanced, with a dark side but highly readable.”
?Lit Reactor

“It's up there with the very best I've read.”
?The Book Chemist

?Each story is bursting with imagination; exciting prose; thought-provoking vision. These stories are the cream of the crop, truly fine examples of what make speculative fiction so fascinating. Every piece has a crisp, literary quality to its writing, perfectly melded with the surreal ideas and themes explored within them.”
?Alisha’s Reads

Praise for the anthologies of editor Jacob Weisman

The Treasury of the Fantastic (with David M. Sandner)

?From the evocative images of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's “Kubla Khan’ and Lord Byron's “Darkness’ to Mark Twain's devil tale, “The Mysterious Stranger’ and Max Beerbohm's devil plus time travel fantasy, “Enoch Soames,’ the 44 stories and poems in this compilation of fantastic literature provides a solid grounding in the development of the genre. Because most of the writers are “mainstream’ rather than genre authors, this collection also makes a good case for fantasy as literature, while the presence of Edgar Allan Poe, H.G. Wells and Lord Dunsany alongside Edith Wharton, Emily Dickinson, and E.M. Forster breaks down the barrier between literary and genre fiction. VERDICT: This is an important collection for all lovers of fantasy and literature.”
?Library Journal

?The Treasury of the Fantastic truly is a treasury of wonderful stories—Turns out there's not a dud to be found.”
?Fantasy and Science Fiction

"A marvelous mix of classics and rarely seen works, bibliophile's finds and old favorites....a treasury in every sense and a treasure!"
?Connie Willis, author of Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog

"The fantasy tradition in English and American literature is rich and varied and strange. This is the book to read to find out what you never knew you needed to know."
?David G. Hartwell, editor of the Year's Best Fantasy series

?It was an absolute delight to see so [many] of these authors collected here and finding new treasures I hadn’t realized really fell into the realm of fantasy.”
?Tabitha Perkins, My Shelf Confessions

?The Treasury of the Fantastic is truly that, a comprehensive collection of fantastical literature from throughout the many years covering the romanticism era to the early twentieth century.... an exquisitely curated collection....”
?The Arched Doorway

The Sword & Sorcery Anthology (with David G. Hartwell)

?Heroes and their mighty deeds populate the pages of this delightfully kitschy yet absorbing anthology of sword and sorcery short stories from the 1930s onward. Hartwell and Weisman have selected some of the best short-form work in the genre, starting with the originator, Robert E. Howard, and his tales of Conan the Barbarian. The heroes are tough, savvy, and willing to knock a few heads in to get the job done. The soldier of Glen Cook’s Dread Empire and Fritz Leiber’s Grey Mouser make strong appearances, as does Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné and his dread sword, Stormbringer. Female heroes are as ruthless as their male counterparts: C.L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry walks through Hell and back to get her revenge, while George R. R. Martin’s Daenerys Stormborn becomes a true queen by outmaneuvering an entire city of slavers. This is an unbeatable selection from classic to modern, and each story brings its A game.”
?Publishers Weekly, starred review

?The 19 stories in this volume span a time period from 1933 to 2012 and provide a strong introduction to this fantasy subgenre.”
?Library Journal

?Awesome collection, very highly recommended.”
?Nerds in Babeland

?Superbly presented...reignited this reader’s interest.”
?SF Site

?A big, meaty collection of genre highlights that runs the gamut from old-school classics to new interpretations, it serves as an excellent introduction and primer in one.”
?Green Man Review